The Great Swindle by Pierre Lemaitre
Translated by Frank Wynne Reviewed by Annabel French author Lemaitre is best known for his gory yet gripping trilogy of serial killer novels featuring the detective Camille Verhoeven. They aren’t…
Translated by Frank Wynne Reviewed by Annabel French author Lemaitre is best known for his gory yet gripping trilogy of serial killer novels featuring the detective Camille Verhoeven. They aren’t…
Paperback review by Annabel Most trilogies are strictly sequential, one volume carrying on from another. Louise Welsh’s ‘Plague Times’ trilogy is slightly different (so far) in that the first two…
Reviewed by Annabel O’Neill’s first novel, Only Ever Yours, published in 2014, won a host of prizes in her native Ireland. Aimed at older teenagers upwards, it was a futuristic…
Reviewed by Annabel Tess’s mother died giving birth to her brother Axel. They live with their father in a cabin at the edge of a town in the middle of…
Reviewed by Annabel I was lucky enough to have discovered Jonathan Coe fairly early on in his career, back when the paperback edition of What a Carve Up! was published…
Reviewed by Annabel Ranjit Bolt is well known as a translator and playwright. He came to prominence when two of his translations of French comedies by Pierre Corneille, The Liar and The Illusion,…
Reviewed by Annabel. As picture books for grown ups go, Mythology is the business. Now available in soft covers, this nine inches square book yields glorious pictorial spreads from the very moment you…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell This may have been the first novel I’ve read by Franco-Vietnamese SF&F author Aliette de Bodard, but it certainly won’t be the last. She has already…
Reviewed by Annabel I still have a huge affection for Star Trek in all its incarnations and, as time goes on, although Jean-Luc Picard is the man for me, I prefer the…
Reviewed by Annabel The prologue of this novel set in the near future begins in some style. College student Skyler Wakefield opted to stay and work as a babysitter for…
Reviewed by Annabel Tom Drury is the author of a trio of exquisite observational dramas following the everyday life of the inhabitants of Grouse County, Iowa, a location which epitomises…
Reviewed by Annabel Many of you will recognise Meike Ziervogel as the founder of Peirene Press; we’ve reviewed several of their novella length books in Shiny New Books (here and here for example)….
Reviewed by Annabel In this review, I could just make a list of the all the great noir novels and movies and their authors that went through my mind as…
Reviewed by Annabel Before you ask – yes, that does make 1001 nights. Rushdie’s new novel may have its roots in the ancient tales but it is also a thoroughly modern story…
Reviewed by Annabel Hats off to Bloomsbury on the lovely design of this wonderful novel. You can’t see here, but there is a cut-out of the watch dial, and all around…
Review by Annabel Anyone who has ever been enthralled by reading or seeing the film of The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s seminal story of the USA’s quest to break the…
As his second YA novel All Sorts of Possible is published (reviewed here), author Rupert Wallis stops off at Shiny New Books on his blog tour to tell us about his experience including…
Reviewed by Annabel I saw a repeat of a Horizon TV programme all about sinkholes the other month. Geology professor Ian Stewart was in Florida, which is the sinkhole capital of the…
Reviewed by Annabel It’s hard to know where to start in writing about this memoir. I could be glib and say it’s about the healing power of classical music, which…
Reviewed by Annabel There are large numbers of popular science books written about particle physics, space and the periodic table, ditto for medicine and the mind. There are fewer books about…
Reviewed by Annabel Can you believe that it is thirty years since Jilly Cooper introduced us to Rutshire and her best-selling doorstop of sex and showjumping? Her publishers, Corgi, have…
Reviewed by Annabel To many, Sheers is primarily known as a Welsh poet. His 2005 collection Skirrid Hill was acclaimed, and he has presented some poetry programmes on the television, and wrote…
Reviewed by Annabel They say that every picture tells a story – or sometimes more. When seventeen year old Peggy finds an old photograph of her family and Oliver, the…
Paperback review by Annabel A large part of the novel Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (which I reviewed here) was set twenty years after a global flu pandemic had wiped out…